Bass Street Landing

The Dope and the Dopette thought they'd check out Moline's latest pride and joy, the "Bass Street Landing" area, which has been in planning and construction for years and which came at a hefty price for taxpayers.

I'd dinged it in previous posts as it's nothing but an expanse of uninviting concrete hundreds of feet from the river with no view of the water whatsoever.

It also neatly benefits "The Blue Ribbon" restaurant, as they apparently have dibs on catering the outdoor events. I guess this is the "public/private" partnership thing we hear mentioned so glowingly. The taxpayers foot the bill for a very expensive project and then one "private" interest reaps the profits. What a deal!

But there's supposed to be more to it than just lining the pockets of a handful of players. The projects are touted as adding to the beauty and quality of life for the residents of Moline. I hope so.

The plaza had it's inaugural event last Saturday, and natch, it involved a large company, in this case, WOC, who sponsored the event. It featured a performance by long-time Iowa musical fixtures, The Blue Band, featuring front man Bob Dorr. They're a great good-time band which features a repertoire of rock and R&B that is guaranteed to satisfy the middle of the road crowd.

The area has a bandstand with a canopy supported by enormous cables and anchored with gigantic plate steel anchors in huge concrete anchor blocks. It truly looks like it's engineered to support a suspension bridge rather than a smallish vinyl canopy. But it should be there a loooooong time. It looks like it would survive a nuclear attack.

The plaza has many nice, and no doubt pricy details, such as cast metal fishes along the sidewalk, designer lamp posts with colorful metal swirls, and perhaps the nicest touch, strings of bare blue bulbs strung criss-cross across the wide concrete slab, giving it the appearance of an Italian festival, though a couple strings were already not functioning.

There's also a fancy fountain installed in a corner of the expanse of concrete which spouts columns of water from the surface of the concrete to create a pleasing "dancing waters" display, though the entire fountain wasn't lit at all and was in such a dark area that you could barely see it for some odd reason.

They had done a lot of work setting up plastic folding tables and chairs all over the slab, and there was an outdoor bar staffed and run I'm assuming by the Blue Ribbon, the restaurant which abuts the plaza.

But sadly, you could count the number of people in attendance on both hands and feet. It was kind of a shame, as so few people on hand in such a vast slab of concrete made it looked particularly desolate. The evening was pretty chilly after a string of warm nights, and that no doubt depressed the turn-out.

I wish the area luck, though apparently the city is relying on corporations to provide the entertainment, and corporations or large companies aren't always the best talent bookers. It will likely result in them playing it so safe that it ensures there's never any bands with much to a large number of people, let alone younger people. But if you enjoy your music bland, hey, you'll love it.

Let's hope that at the end of the day, if you divide the hundreds of thousands of dollars that the city coughed up to construct and maintain Bass Street Landing by the number of Moliners that actually enjoy it, that the figure comes in somewhere below $15,000 a head. Hey, it could happen.